The forgery in the attendant sidebar appeared on Usenet on April Fool's Day, 1990.
It is presented here without comment, merely to show how disgusting the
metaphors of a typical programming language really are. So much for anything
resembling literary value. Larry is particularly relieved that "Black Perl",
originally written for Perl 3, no longer parses under Perl 5.

Perl Poetry

Article 970 of comp.lang.perl:
Path: jpl-devvax!pl-dexxav!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-dexxav.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: news.groups,rec.arts.poems,comp.lang.perl
Subject: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.lang.perl.poems
Message-ID: <0401@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 1 Apr 90 00:00:00 GMT
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NSAS.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Prepulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 61
It has come to my attention that there is a crying need for a place for people to express both their emotional
and technical natures simultaneously. Several people have sent me some items which don't fit into any
newsgroup. Perhaps it's because I recently posted to both comp.lang.perl and to rec.arts.poems, but people
seem to be writing poems in Perl, and they're asking me where they should post them. Here is a sampling:
From a graduate student (in finals week), the following haiku:

I tried that, and it actually parses in Perl. It doesn't appear to do anything useful, however. I think I'm glad,
actually... I hereby propose the creation of comp.lang.perl.poems as a place for such items, so we don't clutter
the perl or poems newsgroups with things that may be of interest to neither. Or, alternately, we should
create rec.arts.poems.perl for items such as those above which merely parse, and don't do anything useful.
(There is precedent in rec.arts.poems, after all.) Then also create comp.lang.perl.poems for poems that
actually do something, such as this haiku of my own:

print STDOUT q
Just another Perl hacker,
unless $spring

Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov

Larry's, er, corpus has fortunately been overshadowed by that of the
reigning Perl Poet, Sharon Hopkins. She has written quite a few Perl
poems, as well as a paper on Perl poetry that she presented at the Usenix
Winter 1992 Technical Conference, entitled "Camels and Needles: Computer
Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language". (The paper is available as
misc/poetry.ps on CPAN.) Besides being the most
prolific Perl poet,
Sharon is also the most widely published, having had
the following poem published in both the Economist and the
Guardian: